How Many Lives Has A Goldfish?

Is there no end to the stress the pond can bring me? I went outside to feed the fish today and found one, the one who was savaged some months ago and spent several weeks recuperating in the hospital tank, on top of a stay there last year after its fins began falling apart, lying on top of the netting that covers the pond. Its head was still in the water so it was able to breathe but lay passively waiting for help. I scooped it up and put it back in the water whereupon it swum happily away. How did it get there? I can only imagine that it found its way into the little gully next to the plant pot which is not covered by netting, got stuck, and flipped itself out of the water trying to escape. Just as well no heron or cat was anywhere around as no fish could be in a more vulnerable position. I've now adjusted the net.

Last night, though, I managed to see two bats flitting about which has only happened once before. Every year I wonder whether there will be any bats and their reappearance is always a relief: I feel has though delight has not abandoned the garden.

St Mary's, Thorpe

Our SCP chapter met at Thorpe in the northwest of Surrey on Tuesday, or at least a number of us consonant with covid restrictions did. There is no guesswork needed at all about the tradition at Thorpe, though I’m not quite clear when it started; the advowson was owned by the Lords of the Manor, the Leigh-Bennetts, who must have approved of the actions of the combative priest installed in 1907, Somerville Henry Lushington. However, it wasn’t just Fr Lushington’s High Churchery which provoked a visit from the Kensitites in 1910 but also a set of very grubby personal disagreements which don’t really show the aristocratic vicar and his supporters in that good a light. There were rowdy Protestant demonstrations (‘Ritualism means Ruin!!’) and in 1911 the church was broken into and the altar fittings dumped in the churchyard wrapped in an altarcloth. By 1916 Fr Lushington was dead, and his replacement, Basil Edrupp, while firmly maintaining Thorpe’s Catholic tradition, was apparently a much more emollient character who aroused no opposition at all. In 1930 the Leigh-Bennetts sold the manor house, Thorpe Place right opposite the church, to the Sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage as a new home for the Spelthorne Sanatorium at Bedfont, a hostel for women especially with alcohol problems; there it stayed until 1955. Some of the fixtures in the church come from the convent chapel.

The church as we see it now has undergone waves of refurbishment. There was a 19th-century rebuilding in which the 13th-century arcades were taken down and rebuilt – though it’s uncertain when this happened – and we owe the small building’s spaciousness to Fr Lushington who at the cost of local controversy cleared out the pews. Then there are the fittings brought in from the convent, almost certainly including the altar furniture in the cramped north chapel – now known as the Benedict Chapel – and possibly the canopy over the high altar. That replaced a wooden reredos which, to judge by a photo in the hallway at the church, was probably 1930s or 40s, in a major reordering in the 1980s also including new flooring and a nave altar.

These sedilia are genuinely medieval, as is one of the piscinae. Guess which is the fake.

Thorpe is a lovely church, almost cleared of its medieval atmosphere and yet wonderfully warm and comfortable, and laden with attractive things. I try to avert my eye, however, from the grim crucifixion over the chancel arch, painted by an expert on, of all things, Ethiopian manuscript illustrations, Beatrice Playne. If only it had been based on one of those. You’d never guess it dated to the 1960s.

And what did we discuss? Catholic mission, of course, rather as usual!

School Scenes

Delivering assemblies at the infants school is still a new experience; I sit in front of the children and realise how few of them I am very familiar with having spent a year, really, not going anywhere near the place. On Monday I waited for the headteacher to finish her assembly with Year 1 before I did mine with Year 2. She was relating the story of St Paul escaping Damascus by being lowered down the city wall in a basket. As the children lined up to leave the hall, one small boy pointed out to me that 'It was still Jesus helping Paul, because he gave people the idea to rescue him'. 'Ah, you're doing what's called theology', I replied.

I looked out of the window at the playground where Year 2 were finishing break before coming in to hear me tell them the story of Pentecost. On the far side two small girls were engaged in what appeared to be a deeply serious conversation, in between bites of apples. They were using emphatic, nay histrionic, gestures, waving, pointing, holding out their hands as each replied to whatever point the other had made. I wonder what they were talking about. They looked like a pair of seven-year-old French philosophers. 

Owlen (= 'roaming about at night')

A woman wanders through a wood, or a setting with the appearance of a wood, making odd gestures and talking about dead sheep and thrushes, and wearing a dress with an eyeball scrawled on it. Were we not aware that she is PJ Harvey and therefore an emissary of the powers beyond, we might simply assume that she was nuts. Our heroine was performing at the (slightly abortive) livestreamed Glastonbury Festival: not singing, but reading poetry, another couple of offerings from what we all still hope is the forthcoming collection ‘about a haunted sheep farm in Dorset’. But then it’s been forthcoming for four years now …

The poems were trailed as being ‘in Dorset dialect’. This is interesting, because Dorset dialect is not something anyone now uses, nor has used for a very long time. Remember I am a mere six weeks younger than Ms H, and, though I grew up in suburban Bournemouth rather than a village just northeast of Beaminster, my mother’s family in particular come from pretty close by there, in south Somerset, and they were all farm workers and the like: one of my mum’s cousins lives just round the corner from the Harvey quarrying business on Ham Hill. PJ’s accent, too, always strikes me as quite gentle (though she stresses it a bit in the Glastonbury performance), much more so than some of my relatives’. Nor is there even just one uniform Dorset accent: Polly clearly has the West Country rhotic ‘r’ in her speech – at least she often does – while I grew up without it, and it’s not that prevalent on the east side of the county anyway. In his 19^th-century Dorset dialect poetry, which she surely has in mind, William Barnes spells the name of the county Dosset, as though it has no ‘r’ sound at all; certainly not the ‘Darzet’ of general non-West Country imagination. You don’t hear that until you get to Cornwall.

I can’t remember anyone from my childhood using dialect words, either: rather, the older generations spoke what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, just with an accent. The closest they came to it was my grandad’s insistence on referring to rats as ‘longtails’; but that smacks more of superstition than general usage, a bit like the reluctance of Portlanders to name the rabbits that undermine the quarries, instead describing them with any number of circumlocutory epithets. In early 1970s Corscombe, I suppose, some of the old farm workers may have used the dialect words they picked up from their grandparents, calling ewe-lambs chilvern or the meal in the middle of the day your nammet – ‘noon meat’; but by coincidence I’ve just read Thomas Hardy’s introduction to his Selected Poems of William Barnes, published in 1908, and even then he laments the demise of the old Dorset speech thanks to mobility and education, and the condescension of the well-to-do. I can’t imagine ‘Dorset Dialect’ was very prevalent even in the Blackmore Vale nearly fifty years ago.

William Barnes used dialect to emphasise the dignity of the Dorset people he worked with as schoolmaster and priest, the relevance of their outlook and experiences. Harvey isn’t doing that; nor does she seem to be using it to recall a culture the tail-end of which she may have brushed against in her childhood. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness of the old Dorset speech becomes an incantation, a means of piercing through normality into a heightened awareness of nature and a soul’s place in it: a way of meditating on identity and feeling, the opposite but equal of what Elisabeth Bletsoe does with her poetry of complexity and technical naming.

Goo on an' publish, Polly!

Music Lives Again

PJ Harvey may be reading poetry at the online Glastonbury Festival today (it is conceivable that I may say more about that another time), but this evening two cellists have been performing in Swanvale Halt as part of a renewed season of classical concerts, and how lovely it is to hear the instruments breathing the music - that's what the cellos sound as though they're doing, it seems to me. The looming red lanterns are this year's decoration for Pentecost tomorrow: I have replaced single-use rubber balloons with bamboo and paper!

Losing Yourself

 

It's nothing more exotic than Widelake Pond on an afternoon of gusty wind and rain, but being sheltered under a canopy of trees and looking out at the drizzle - the fishing gear isn't mine! - calls to mind again that strange sensation of homecoming I have felt before and which seems to connect with very early experiences indeed. But there is something else going on beyond mere familiarity, which the phenomenon of being immersed in sensory experience - sights, sounds, sensations, smells. Birds tracking across the lake and dogs occasionally visible on the far bank: rushes of rain shaking over the water: the ever-shifting patterns of ripples. One feels oneself most 'real' when least self-concerned, just an observer of outside events, lost in things.

'Purbeck - The Ingrained Island' by Paul Hyland (1989 edn.)

The Isle of Purbeck has a wider variety of wildflowers than any other comparable area of the British Isles. This is because of its complex geology, its bands of different rock running east-west along it, and the alluvial sands and gravels of the heath along its northern, Poole Harbour, side. And of course it’s not an island, even if you count the River Frome and its one-time marsh margins south of Wareham as a water barrier; westwards Purbeck sort of just disappears into Dorset generally and it’s not completely clear when you have left it.

On my last Dorset sojourn back in the Autumn I bought a secondhand copy of Paul Hyland’s Purbeck: the Ingrained Island. Hyland organises his meditative travelogue around those different geological regions, so wildly distinct within this compact area – the Provinces, he calls them, and names each after the tool that characterises human use of that mini-landscape. Soils, natural history, and the business of human exploitation, lay over each other in what is a thoroughly sedimentary approach to landscape-writing, not written chronologically, but each layer packing down to form a palimpsest portrait of a remarkable part of the world. The Ingrained Island was first published in 1978, when some of the old lads who’d worked in Purbeck’s quarries west of Swanage could still be found nursing pints at the Square & Compass in Worth Matravers, coated with limestone-dust, one pictures; early enough for that, and late enough for its author to worry about what the result of oil drilling on the Isle at Kimmeridge and Arne might be. Forty years later those oil fields are almost exhausted and another layer of Purbeck’s past settles into memory. Each facet of the past Hyland calls attention to is not an isolated fact but one detail of a vast and interlocked picture: every location rests on its own history, linked to every other’s, not a separate fact but a note in the grey-green music whose great themes are rock and work. The book concludes with the mock-Saxon cross at Studland, blessed only a couple of years before the text was complete, weaving birds and jet planes with a vine, making the author’s point for him.

It’s quite a brutal narrative, sometimes, one feels when reading the poetry which introduces each section, perhaps deliberately so. But there is not a page you feel you’ve wasted your time reading. Purbeck ‘is like a hand that holds a secret. Finger by finger it opens, disclosing only itself, a scarred and work-worn hand, an ingrained palm to be lovingly grasped, and read’; and here is the secret’s key.

Dawns, Golden and False

Six years ago I wrote a series of posts about the resemblances between the unconventional Christian healing ministry of Agnes Sanford and the occult practice of Dion Fortune - possibly something it is quite improper for me to take an interest in, but it does raise intriguing questions about orthodox Christianity. I'm thinking around this area again as I may be doing another Goth Walk, as I have long, long promised, about the 'occult societies of Victorian London'. To be honest, there's only one, the Golden Dawn, unless you count the GD's various offshoots and splinters. You can find shadowy references to other stuff around the same time, but nothing very definite.

In the course of this I read Sword of Wisdom by Ithell Colquhoun, a mid-twentieth-century Surrealist artist who was a fierce partisan of Samuel and Moina Mathers, the 'Supreme Magus' of the Golden Dawn and his redoubtable wife. Colquhoun never met either of them, only joining the Alpha et Omega - the society composed of Mathers loyalists left after the Golden Dawn's great disruption at the turn of the century - in 1928 when it was run by Isabel Morgan Boyd, Moina Mathers's decreed successor; at that time she was a student at the Slade School of Art, where Moina had been enrolled nearly fifty years before. It's clear how Colquhoun identified with them both. In her book, published in 1975, she's scathing in differing degrees about those who left the true fold and proved disloyal to her idols even where, as with WB Yeats, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune, she recognises their abilities. They have cut themselves off from the true stream of hidden truth, she avers, and there lies an interesting parallel with the world I normally move in.

Now, central to the idea of the Golden Dawn were the Secret Chiefs. It was unclear who they were supposed to be; Mathers came to believe that they were 'human and living on this earth, but possessing terrible superhuman powers'. In its early years the Golden Dawn used a series of rituals and symbolism derived from the 'Cipher Manuscripts' which had come into the hands of one of the founders, William Wynn Westcott, and which Mathers had translated; they had contained the address of an obscure German occultist, one Fraulein Sprengel, who, when contacted by Westcott, communicated to the British esotericists the instructions of the Secret Chiefs, whoever they were. But Sprengel apparently died in 1890 and two years later Mathers announced that he had made contact with the Chiefs himself, marking a shift in the Order's emphasis towards practical magic, astral projection, clairvoyance, and that sort of thing. As the Golden Dawn fell apart around 1900 Mathers alleged that Westcott had made it all up, to the horror of the membership, but far from feeling that this undermined his own authority in any way he clearly felt he was vindicated by his separate contact with the occult powers that were directing him. 

Did Mathers believe all this? I hadn't read his 'Manifesto' until a couple of days ago, issued to all members of the Second Order of the GD in the 1890s; in this he states that the Chiefs communicated all the rituals of the Order by clairvoyance, divination, and occasionally audible voices which both he and Moina heard. It reads like the work of someone who is capable of being deluded by his own enthusiasm, but not necessary an obvious fake or nutcase, so perhaps he did. Some GD enthusiasts are content to point to the practical usefulness of the Order's techniques and argue that whether it actually came from some outer force or just from Mathers's fertile imagination doesn't matter. Ithell Colquhoun disagrees, arguing that Mathers was the Chiefs' chosen leader and nobody could break with him without also cutting themselves off from the true source of magical power:

You cannot lightly reject their choice ... Once made it cannot be switched to some other Conductor by human caprice.

The key question, Colquhoun insists, is whether you accept the reality of the Secret Chiefs. If they are genuine, if they exist in any commonly-accepted sense as beings with wills and initiative, then

dissidents are without sanction from the initiatic chain and will suffer, sooner or later, from psychic aetiolation.

You can see what's going on here: it's an occultist's version of the Apostolic Succession. Dissident occult societies are to the Golden Dawn what Protestant denominations are to the Catholic Church: they may do worthwhile and interesting things but essentially they are sundered from the divine electricity which keeps things going and will, ultimately, wither. Now, this is a caricature of Apostolic Succession, but I was intrigued to see the same idea cropping up in this context. 

Christian origins, too, are, as we know, nothing if not mysterious and the exact mix of reality and distortion can be argued about infinitely by Biblical and other scholars. Apostolic Succession is a way of getting around the uncertainty, but as Fr Couratin said once, it's less a matter of 'hands on heads than of bums on thrones' - that is, what matters is not the technical details of the consecration of one bishop by another in an unbroken sequence back to the apostles, but the role of the bishops in formulating the communities of believers in which the truth of the Gospel is settled, explored and meditated on. In occult terms, if the angels will forgive the analogy, we are more with Dion Fortune than with Ithell Colquhoun.

Hail the Day!

My cotta is only the wonkiest of the three clergy here because I have been fiddling in my pocket trying to turn my microphone on. Yesterday for the great festival of the Lord's Ascension we had a service at church on behalf of Churches Together in Hornington and District led by me and Fr Jeffery the Roman Catholic priest, with Marlene from Tophill Church preaching. Fifty souls was far more than I was expecting and despite the predominately Catholic tone (the chanting of the Magnificat was to a particularly Catholic tone, one I had to be introduced to) it was a genuinely ecumenical event with people present from lots of churches. Only I and Fr Jeffery did the singing, of course, and I could have done with 'Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise' being pitched a bit lower. It always amazes me that, after the first verse, you never seem to sing the same version of that hymn in any setting you happen to be.

Coming Up Not Quite Roses

To my amazement it was 2016 that I first noticed bugle coming up in the garden terraces at the Rectory. Every year since I have looked out for it and rejoiced a little when it has appeared, surviving again to add a little wildflower colour to the surroundings. This year there are loads of the little cones of purplish hue towering an inch or two upwards from the beds.

Another plant I have come to welcome is the Common Vetch, I think mainly because I didn't know what it was and took a while before triumphantly identifying it. This flower is both valued and scorned by farmers depending on what they are doing: it adds nitrite to the soil and is a good fodder plant for livestock, but you don't want it around once the crops are growing. In a garden, it merely straggles, coils, and flowers. Again, in past years I've had the odd stringy patch of it here and there, but this season it's all over the place. 

And thus the yellows and golds of early Spring - primrose and celandine - give way to the purples and the pinks.

All being well the roses will appear later on!

Paper Mountain

Margaret's anniversary combined with the forthcoming Annual Parochial Church Meeting has made me reflect on something that has surfaced in my mind for quite some time; where exactly are all the old PCC records? We have had four PCC secretaries since I arrived in Swanvale Halt, including Margaret who was just retiring at that time. She handed on to me a vast collection of papers: her husband, who'd died some years before, had been church treasurer at one stage and so there were dual his'n'hers copies of a lot of the records. Eventually those went up to the loft in the church but scanning round the place now I am not entirely sure where they are, and I haven't kept tabs on the location of the more recent ones at all.

Clearing out my study yesterday I realised that a collection of ring-binders underneath a table were in fact a group of PCC records that came from Harriet - or was it Pru? - when she relinquished the role of Secretary. So I can account for those. Meanwhile Darren, the new Secretary, has always preferred digital record-keeping, partly because of health issues that make it sensible to reduce the amount of dust-harbouring paper he might have around the place. But I think there should be hard copies as well, if only because I am supposed to sign the minutes off, and thanks to the dislocations and remote meetings of the last year or so I am not sure what I have physically signed and what I haven't: such is the relief of getting to the end of a rushed Zoom meeting that remembering actually to stick my signature on something at a future point is a demand too far, it seems. I know, gentle reader, that such matters are eye-wateringly dull, but among my many other 'recovery tasks' will be dealing with this!

Keeping in Mind

It was Margaret's anniversary. Former churchwarden and PCC secretary, she died a year ago today. Of course her funeral had to be constrained and covid-compliant, and we said virtually nothing about her life, delaying it, as was so often then, to some putative memorial service some time in the future which may or may not actually happen. 

Although she was not the oldest member of the church, even right at the end of her life, she was the one I directed people towards if they were making any kind of historical enquiry. She remembered everything. Taken into hospital after a fall, the nurse on duty asked her the usual questions about the date and who the Prime Minister was and then when the War ended: Margaret answered not only with the year but the dates of VE and VJ Days and followed up with the Accession of the Queen. When she could no longer get to church and I took her communion at home, there was no news I could tell her that she didn't already know even if nobody could actually be identified who'd told her. Presumably it was angels.

Margaret looked like she should have spent most of her waking hours in a farmhouse kitchen making pies and kneading dough, but although she had a round rural accent I can't remember where she came from before landing up in the middle of Surrey. She was a lady of solid and undemonstrative faith, which she needed when her son, a priest, died of cancer not very much older than I am now. For a long while her eyesight was extremely poor but she never needed a printed order of service as she knew the whole liturgy off by heart (even the modern one). There was a period when hardly anyone was attending the midweek mass on a Tuesday morning, but she almost invariably did, sitting in the same spot with her hands folded, reciting all the words. One St George's Day as part of my homily I said a bit of Henry V's speech from Shakespeare's account of Agincourt, and I could see Margaret saying it along with me.

This evening I said the Office in the Lady Chapel, grateful after a wearing day (due to nobody but me) to be alone. Except that I found myself looking across to where Margaret used to sit, and thanking God for her passing across my life for a few years. 

Effingham & Little Bookham

St Laurence's Effingham has had a definite Catholic tradition though as with many churches it isn't what it was. Holy water stoups are all empty at the moment, but Effingham's greets you along with a little statue of the BVM on a windowsill nearby:

You will have noticed that the holy water stoup is made from a medieval original, and the church as it is now is something of a co-operation between eras. The east end is all lavish Victoriana, a restoration of 1888 with additions ...

... while the south transept is medieval and totally different. Pevsner, more than a little unfairly, describes it as 'the only part of the church with any character':

It's here that you can find an icon of Our Lady (just about visible on the wall in the photo) and an aumbry, again set into a medieval niche and clearly still used although the rather spindly stand for tealights acting as the sacrament lamp is at present unlit:

The splendid high altar is presently neglected in favour of a strange though very Gothic and Catholic sort-of cupboard pressed into sacred service in the nave:

Finally there are perhaps traces of former practices to spot. Was the prie-dieu in the transept there for confessions, and was the War Memorial in the churchyard originally a War Shrine? The corpus might suggest so.

A short and easy footpath takes you from St Laurence's to Little Bookham church, somewhat disconcertingly as it doesn't feel that the two buildings should really be this close together. Here, the restoration of 1869 left virtually nothing of the older church visible, and after that event the Catholic movement seems to have gone no further; there wasn't even a dedication until 1986, when the church became All Saints'. The reredos and east window are splendid, but that's about it.

Christos Anesti!

By now that should not be news, but Dr RedMedea is Greek and so for her Easter has come a bit later than in the Anglican calendar. On her terrace on Sunday afternoon we were introduced to the custom of egg-smashing, which does require some temporary relaxation of social-distancing regulations. The red-dyed hard-boiled Pasch eggs are knocked together and the holder of the smashed egg has to eat it: that was me, on this occasion. You might have thought that Greeks do seem to like smashing things but in fact this custom was once very widespread and still takes place in bits of England even if I had never encountered it before. Dr RedMedea was disappointed with the dyeing of her eggs but they seemed appropriately livid to the rest of us. 

Demise and Survival

The pond and its residents have been a trial lately. Firstly I found a fish (the same one that was sick a while ago) with horrible wounds down its flanks: I couldn't see how it could have been attacked and did wonder whether it had got itself wedged somewhere and hurt itself trying to get free, so out of the pond and into the hospital tank it went for recuperation. There it remains, I hope slowly healing but clearly unhappy: the fish never like being in the hospital tank, tend not to eat anything and look very miserable during their exile. Then it became clear that one of the others was carrying eggs which it eventually laid, though being a young fish and having had them inside for some time they seem to have all been duff, which was a dreadful waste of energy on her part and that of the male fish who pursued her round the pond. Then a day or two later I found the female fish dead, with the same pattern of wounds as the sick one - less severe, but in her case apparently more deadly. Clearly something had happened as the pump had been shifted (stood on?) and the netting disturbed. I rearranged it so it is very hard to get anywhere even near the water.

But then I did a chemical test and discovered that the pH of the pondwater was sky-high, possibly because of the amount of algae present and/or a brick leaching lime into the pond. High pH makes goldfish very dopey and affects their ability to feed and so on. So I did a big clear-out, rearranging the pond's stones and scrubbing off as much algae as I could.

In the course of this I cleaned one of the plant baskets which holds some weed and noticed something that shouldn't have been there. It turned out to be a small cheap digital watch that I had lost some months before: I had had no idea where it was, and it had sat beneath the water all that time. It has lost about a minute and not long after I retrieved it the alarm went off. It does say 'Water Resist' on the front and so it has turned out!